archives

July 2004

July 31st, 2004. Photogenic

As advertised, W appeared on Crimewatch the other night. He played a dastardly burglar who beat up an old woman with a walking stick, and no doubt has since been shopped to the police a dozen times by people who don't understand what a reconstruction is. Frankly, I didn't think he fitted the description they were looking for very well; the villain was also described as looking like a 22-year-old Worzel Gummidge. Not very W, really.*

In other media news, an Edinburgh friend of mine is apparently appearing in the current edition of Penthouse - well, her arse is, at least. I have to say, I'm intrigued, but not intrigued enough to actually buy a copy.

* but I suppose it's a compliment that they think he looks a few years younger than he really is.

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July 29th, 2004. Foolscap Boxfile Number One

Am feeling as if I have regressed to 17; probably because I am living with The Parents, and am supposed to be tidying my bedroom. It's too hot to tidy my bedroom right now, though, so I'm sat watching telly. W is, he tells me, going to appear on tonight's Crimewatch.

My current word of the week is 'hrútspúngar', a traditional Icelandic dish consisting of pickled testicles.

I really need to thin out my bookshelves, so I can then refill them with all the books I brought down here from my old flat in Edinburgh. Books and things that are currently on the shelves but deserve to get thinned out include:

And lots more besides. But what to do with it all? Who the hell would buy 20-year-old train timetables?

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July 27th, 2004. Zeno Was Here

In today's news: the British government is going to send everybody a leaflet telling them what to do when the terrorists attack. The same things they were telling us twenty years ago, of course: stay indoors, put the telly or the radio on, keep some tinned food and some bottled water by. No doubt it will encourage The Mother to restart her cunning plan to stockpile empty bottles, so that when the attack comes and the water supply is undrinkable she'll have - well, lots of empty bottles.

In other news: local teenage murderer gets life, and definitely won't get out until he's at least my age. I'm a bit puzzled as to what the victim's family said: it wouldn't have happened if the school had more security cameras. The school already had security cameras. The stabbing itself didn't get caught on camera, but they did get the victim stumbling along the corridor immediately afterwards. No doubt everybody in the school knew the cameras were there, too. Having more of them wouldn't have made the slightest bit of difference.

The Grimsby Telegraph, on the other hand, knew exactly what caused the killing. Remember, the G. T. is a Daily Mail publication; so, unsurprisingly, the murder was obviously caused by watching the wrong sort of movies! "Police discovered a collection of violent videos at the home of Alan Pennell," apparently. He "lived in a fantasy world of videos and knives." The paper wheeled on Scunthorpe-based clinical psychologist Dr. Patricia Frankish to tell us that "there is enough horrors in our own minds than having to show it all on film and TV [sic]. The likes of Tarantino should go away and create their films for themselves." So, there you go, then. Glad that's all cleared up.

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July 25th, 2004. Exploding seals and other things

Because it hasn't been done in a while, I've decided it's time for Search Requests I Have Received.

I think that's enough of that.

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July 23rd, 2004. The letters page

When my internet connection was down last week, I felt at a bit of a loose end. Didn't know what to do with myself. "What would Tim Mickleburgh do?" I thought. So, of course, I tried writing a letter to the local paper.

They had published a long, detailed letter from the local organiser of a certain right-wing organisation,* repeating their usual nonsense about how Britain was a much nicer place before we had all that nasty immigration. We didn't have football violence back then, apparently, or a 'spiralling crime rate', or an 'unjust' war in Iraq. So, I wrote in pointing out that this is all rubbish, and, amazingly, they printed the letter. Maybe this is just a first step on an exciting new career of newspaper correspondance. Or, on the other hand, maybe not.

I'm slightly worried, to be honest. If they printed my letter, it means nobody else wrote in to dispute the Nasty Party's claims. Which means that Grimsby really is a hotbed of right-wing let's-kick-out-all-the-darkies Daily Mail sentiments, just as I was hoping it wasnt. Damn. Well, the world won't go around changing itself, I guess.

* the one that it's important not to confuse with a big French bank.

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July 21st, 2004. Love Is An Arrow

Up in Edinburgh and Glasgow, they have a listings magazine called, rather boringly, The List. It has the usual listings, reviews and everything; annual restaurant and pub guides; but its best known feature is in the back with the small ads. It's called I Saw You, and it's a kind of free personals service. If you've seen someone cute but didn't get their number, you're supposed to put an ad in I Saw You, and see if they reply. A few clubs and bars even have free I Saw You postboxes, so you don't even have to pay for a stamp.

Now, I don't know anyone who's actually done this* - or who actually reads it, in fact - but I think lots of people would probably the sort of people who get mentioned in I Saw You, go on dates, and if they're not careful end up turning into characters from an ITV comedy-drama.** And, even though I'd never ever read it or send ads in to it, I wish there was something like that for this area. When I see someone attractive in the street, I want there to be at least a plausible mechanism for getting in touch with them, even if I'd never actually use it. After all, I'd never dare actually go up and start talking to someone at random. Even if there's no chance of me meeting anyone, I want there to be at least some faint, potential path to follow, rather than no hope at all.

* that's not true, to be honest - I can think of one person who sent them an ad, but it doesn't count. Oh, and regular commenter Retro^sec once spotted an I Saw You ad which was almost certainly from Stuart Murdoch - lead singer of Belle and Sebastian - to his girlfriend, whilst her band was on tour in Spain. Or maybe it was from her to him; I can't really remember.

** they did do an I Saw You-inspired series once, didn't they? I think it had Fay Ripley in it, but I could easily be thinking of something else.

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July 18th, 2004. Nostalgia

My horoscope the other day said something about not belittling former partners. I'm one of those people who ignores their horoscope 90% of the time and gets terribly overexcited the 10% of the time it seems to fit with what she wants to be doing. I do, though, sometimes feel guilty of the way I talk about my ex.*

I don't think I've ever written about my ex-boyfriend here at all, and for a very good reason: he's a regular reader, and has been for as long as I've known him. I've sometimes planned to write about him, but it's never got off the drawing-board. For the record: he was a student, he's got long brown hair, and he comes from a place known on the telly as Royston Vasey.

The reason I mention this now is that I'm living on my own at the moment again - the Parents have gone off on holiday - and so I have to cook for myself. Bored of microwave dinners, I decided to try a recipe that I'd seen him cook. Well, not a recipe; he just looks in the fridge and the vegetable basket, throws handfuls of stuff in, and It Works. And the smell of it cooking took me right back to his kitchen in south Edinburgh, last autumn; wooden furniture and yellow-and-blue painted walls. I think I miss him.

(the recipe, incidentally, was for a mushroom and onion sauce, to go with roasted root vegetables. I can roast a tray of vegetables with no problem, but the sauce didn't exactly turn out as ... well, saucy as planned - it was rather more "slightly sticky mushrooms and onions". It still tasted great, though - although I made rather too much for one.)

* although not the Mad Ex, who I don't care about one little bit. Consistancy is a blah blah something of weak minds, after all.

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July 16th, 2004. My Neighbour Is A Twat. Warning: long rant ahead

I knew exactly what was going to happen. I could see it coming. I knew it.

My next-door neighbour is, to put it bluntly, a moron. I've just called him a moron to his face, in fact. One of the many moronic things he did: buy a small sapling, a couple of feet high, and plant it right by the front of his house, just below our telephone wire. Because he's a moron, it was a leylandii. Within a few years, it was taller than both of our houses, with a foot-thick trunk passing a few inches from the phone cable.

He's planning to move house soon. He's a great fan of the USA, and ideally wants to move to New Orleans, because he'll be able to buy as many guns as he wants there. However, as he'd never be able to get a visa,* he's doing the next best thing and moving to the Isle of Man.** As the tree (and his garden in general) has been knocking a few thousand quid off the house value, he decided to get some friends of his to help cut it down.

Fast forward to Tuesday morning. The fuckwit and his friends have been wandering all over his and our front gardens, lopping branches off the tree with gay abandon. There's lots of chainsaw noise. I hear the main trunk fall, look outside, and spot that our phone line doesn't seem to be there any more. Heart sinking, I check the phone; it's dead, of course. As I'm doing so, the doorbell rings. It is, of course, the moron from next door.

Him: "Can I have your phone number?"

Me, knowing full well what has happened: "Why?"

"I want to report a fault on your phone line. We had a bit of an accident and snapped your phone wire."

"No," I say, trying not to go into a full-on sweary rant, "I'll phone them up, and I'll tell them what happened, thank you very much."

And, lo, I then have to stay in for three days waiting for an engineer to appear, because BT seem to have little idea where any of their engineers actually are at any given time. I'm assured that the bill for the repair will land on next-door's doormat. But, come lunchtime today, there is a new wire in place, and we have a working phone again.

Fast forward to this afternoon: I bump into the moron at the bus stop in town - but as soon as he sees me, he stops waiting for the bus and scuttles away. Later, he comes to the door again:

"I thought I'd let you know, I'm complaining to BT about the phone line. They're not allowed to run it over my land."

I'd better describe the arrangement here, which has been the same ever since the estate was built twenty-odd years ago. There is a phone pole at the edge of the pavement, on the far corner of the neighbour's garden. It serves twelve houses, six on each side of the street. The six wires on this side of the street all cross the neighbour's garden and driveway. Several of them also cross our garden too, and all the gardens either side. This hasn't changed since 1982. So, I get him to explain.

"They're not allowed to run wires over my garden like that. They'll either have to pay me, or put up another pole somewhere. I'm going to phone their legal people tomorrow."

I point out that, as I said, these phone wires have been in place for over twenty years - and since before he bought his house.

"I didn't know about it then, though. I'm not complaining to you. I just thought I'd better let you know."

"Yes," I said, "well, I don't think you'll get very far." I pointed out that plenty of people round here have other people's wires crossing their gardens.

"Well, they don't go right across like yours goes across mine."

"Just as long as you don't do anything stupid that breaks the cable again."

"That was an accident," he says, smiling.

"If you weren't such a moron, though, it wouldn't have happened. I mean, you have to be pretty stupid to plant a tree that close to the wire in the first place. I know it was only small when you planted it..."

"It was only a little thing, yes."

"... but you really have to be stupid if you didn't know how tall it was going to grow."

"Ahahaha," he says, laughing mirthlessly.

"Well, we'll see how far you get with complaining," I say, shutting the door on him.

* because he's been jobless and living on benefits for most of the past twenty years. He's on incapacity benefit, I believe, even though he seems perfectly fit and healthy and can cope with heavy manual work - such as cutting down trees, for example.

** Does anyone else remember the "We're from the Isle of Man!" sketches from The Fast Show? I've got a feeling that he'll fit right in.

21:16 Link Comments (4)

July 13th, 2004. Oops

A quick Public Service Announcement from Caitlin's friend Owen*: Caitlin's neighbour has chopped down a tree - on their phoneline. Caitlin will therefore be stranded (electronically speaking) in Gehenna Lincolnshire until the neighbour has paid up and the phoneline is back in working order.


*Entrusted with the Three Mystic Riddles and the Golden Key of Posting on FatTotS** in order for this important notice to be, uh, noticed***.

**Tee hee hee, fat tots.

***Using footnotes and everything.

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July 12th, 2004. Music review time

There doesn't seem to be any good live music near here, so the local record shops look more and more tempting. Even though I have hardly any money in the bank,* I couldn't resist buying the new album by The Hidden Cameras, which was released today. I tried to go to one of their gigs once, but they didn't turn up; I forgive them, though, because their records are so good. They tend to get compared to Belle and Sebastian a lot in the press - which is fine by me, because I tend to compare all bands to Belle and Sebastian anyway.** B&S, though, don't tend to mention explicit, dirty, gay sex very much. Listening to their lyrics too closely is a bit like searching the web for a word like 'watersports' - and, yes, they have written whole songs about that in the past. Very good, cheerful, catchy pop songs. As The Guardian's review said, "I Want Another Enema, it is safe to say, is the catchiest song ever written about wanting another enema." Their songs stick in my head so well, though, I don't really care about the content.

* well, less than none really; but you know what I mean.

** The Hidden Cameras: the Canadian gay porn Belle and Sebastian. Aberfeldy: the Edinburgh Belle and Sebastian. Camera Obscura: the band seemingly born to support Belle and Sebastian. Hildegard of Bingen: the medieval Belle and Sebastian...

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July 9th, 2004. Stories

Two books have been on my mind a lot today. They're books I had when I was younger, and for some reason I always think of them together. I can't remember what either was called, or their authors, but this is what they were about:

If anyone wants to suggest what books I might be talking about here, feel free. As I said, I have absolutely no memory of the authors or titles.

* Plot spoiler: of course, the "plateau" and the "valley" are actually their beds and the gap between them. Maybe - I can't really remember - the quilt patterns had changed slightly when they woke up.

** I know it sounds rather like something involving the Sunshine Sanctuary For Sick Dragons from the Discworld novels, but it's not. It predates that by a few years, as far as I can work out.

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July 7th, 2004. All hardware sucks. All retailers suck too

I like my monitor. It has a nice, big, 1400px picture. I was rather annoyed when, the other day, it decided to stop working. Bugger.

At the moment, I'm using the spare monitor which normally lives under the stairs; my parents' old one. It can do the same resolution, but it's awful. Its colour balance is so off, I'm sure the blue part of the tube must be broken. It takes a lot of fiddling around to get a clean black and white, and it just doesn't do grey.* A greyscale test card goes from black to brown to beige to white. Everything on screen is muddy, as if somebody has poured a cup of tea into the tube. It's awful to work with, especially if you're trying to do anything involving colours. Like, say, redesigning a website.**

So, me and The Mother wander round the electrical shops in town before going to buy the groceries. And, PC World had a nice big CRT monitor, almost identical to my old one. It didn't have a price tag. Fifty quid, said the assistant, after going to look the price up.

"Bargain!" we thought, but didn't really fancy carrying a 17" CRT on the bus. So, we went home, and persuaded Dad to drive us there in the evening. Find the monitor. Have a chat with a different sales assistant. He rings it up on the till. £100. Bugger.

We point out that it was fifty pounds this morning. The manager isn't having any of it, though. "We've been having a lot of price changes today," he says. He asks us who told us the original price. He gets us to describe her. There's no way he's letting it go for a penny under the till price, though. Arse. So, I'm still peering at a murky brown screen.

** and I've spent hours fiddling around with the colour adjustment. The default settings are completely intolerable; after a lot of fiddling, it's at least useable for reading text.

** yes, I know I said I was going to get it done by the end of June...

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July 5th, 2004. Worse Than Death

Another weekend, another exciting traditional activity. Last week was the trip to the seaside; this week it was the Local Village Fete.

We had to go, really, because The Mother was helping to man the tombola stall. One of the many tombola stalls, in fact. There was a bookstall, a bric-a-brac stall, a bouncy castle (burst, though) and at least three tombolas. My mother was showing off exciting prizes,* such as: a tube of foot cream. Two small ceramic birds. A packet of lasagna sheets. A tin of spaghetti shapes. A tea-towel from Benidorm. A tub of Brylcreem. A value-label tin of baked beans. I pointed out that people weren't really going to want to pay 20p for a 1-in-4 chance of winning something worth about 10p.

"They don't realise that, though," said Mrs M, who was also manning the stall.** "We only try to attract innumerate people." I suggested that they would make more money running an illegal poker table, but she thought the Rector might disapprove.

Being a proper English village fete - on the village green and everything - it started to rain before the Rector's wife got around to organising the maypole-dancing. I mean, how more traditional English village fete can you get than maypole-dancing and rain at the same event? We huddled under the pine trees at the corner of the green, watching the bookstall people cover everything with plastic, and the mothers of the maypole-dancers scurry around under umbrellas. We shared a bag of chips from the chip shop, talked about the weather, and wondered when the rain would let off. I was rather bored, and wanted to be home.

* donated, like everything else, by the church congregation. Yes, all these prizes were genuinely on offer on The Mother's tombola stall - and, yes, they were typical. I haven't just picked the worst ones.

** Mrs M is what my dad calls her. He has strange nicknames for all our friends and relatives. Which, really, is ideal when you're writing a blog.

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July 2nd, 2004. I didn't mean to mention sport again so soon, but...

The Mother was rather disappointed by the football, but was still glued to sport at the beginning of the week. Because, you see, Tim still had a chance in the tennis.

Before you get the wrong idea, I'd better point out that Mother isn't really much of a sports fan at all. She keeps an eye on Grimsby Town's football results, and will watch the cricket if it's on the TV, but she's not a fan. She doesn't know the names of many of the players, and she's not a sofa-side analyst like your stereotypical sports fan. But, when Wimbledon is on, she's desperate to know how Tim's doing.*

I felt rather sorry for his opponant last Sunday, as it happens. The crowd wasn't the usual Wimbledon Centre Court crowd - ie, very rich people who spent 20 years on a waiting list.** It was, instead, a crowd of Tim fans. They probably didn't care a whit about the actual game, so long as the points mounted up on Tim's side of the board. They cheered and bayed at every little mistake his opponant*** made. They really wanted, I think, to see the opponant's body ripped in two by one of Tim's aces, and probably then to be pulled apart by ravenous wolves too. They were out for blood. If you ask me, that's just not cricket tennis fair.

(yes, I am one of those boring people who thinks that if we really have to have major sporting events, there should at least be some sense of fair play involved. And if/when most of the US athletics team is banned from this year's Olympics for all those 'undetectable' steroids they've been taking, I will laugh like a drain.)

The whole country seems to go Tim-mad whenever Wimbledon comes round. Tim Mickleburgh even had a letter about him published in today's Guardian about him. I'm half looking forward to his retirement, and half dreading it - he'll be a mainstay of awful TV shows from now until the next century. Does anyone remember how bad John Macenroe was as a Saturday night gameshow presenter? Tim, I'm sure, will be worse.

* "Badly" is the usual answer, of course.

** or corporate hospitality types, I guess.

*** no, I can't remember his name.

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